Angela is having a bad time

So the German parliamentapproved the second bailout package, but it didn’t really go that well. Though approved by an overall majority, Angela Merkel lost votes from her own party and its liberal coalition partner FDP, which isn’t great news.

But that’s not all. The German constitutional court ruled for more disclosure in the decisions about bailout funds. In other words, the current regime where the decision is secretly delegated to a special committee was found unconstitutional. This may cause problems in the question of expanding the European bailout facilities, as demanded by some G20 nations over the weekend. read article

Another ‘American Psycho study‘ was published, showing that wealthier people are more likely to steal, lie and cheat to gain advantage. Interestingly, the stealing bit in the experiment was about stealing candy from children. Another point that is pretty commonly known is that wealthier people are more likely to break traffic laws [says the one who almost lost her license for speeding over Christmas]. But the bottom line is that this study is a call for more philosophy (the author would rather see ‘ethics’ inserted here, I think) in universities. read article

Otherwise, S&P has cut Greece’s rating down to ‘selective default‘. No one cares. But on that note, here’s the Bank of America decision tree on next steps (chart at the bottom)… read article

Buttonwood’s notebook, a blog on the Economist, argues that not enough attention is paid to the problem of ageing population and the decline of the workforce that comes with it. Clearly, the author has never been to Germany. The debate about future pensions has been going on all over Europe for a while now. But now we have a chart to it, showing Ireland as the winner of the European countries. read article

Its fascinating to see that countries who reject and move away from the Bible’s teachings find their society falling apart.
All of a sudden they need classes in “ethics” to try to hold their society together as they have no answer to the problems of a “Me First” type of thinking that permeates the thinking of the population that have refused to listen.